Turning the page

Since 1997, Winnipeg has played host to an annual writer’s festival virtually without fail — even through the COVID-19 pandemic.

And since 2003, Charlene Diehl has been at the helm of that fest — from its days as the Winnipeg International Writers Festival through to its recent rechristening as Thin Air/Livres en fête.

This year, with the help of a young, enthusiastic crew, Diehl has been able to step back a bit, doling out many of the festival’s responsibilities to the eager Plume Winnipeg team while offering advice and insight.

“I’m in my 60s, and at some point I just need to stop doing this,” she says. “I’m not going to be retiring from this at 75, and you can’t really move someone into very active roles if you don’t get out of the way.”

A couple of years ago Diehl first indicated she’d like to have more of a coaching role versus being, as she says, “at the front edge of the blade, which I’ve done for ages.” But a sweeping personnel change meant the the team at Plume Winnipeg, which runs Thin Air/Livres en fête, had to be rebuilt.

Enter a trio of new faces — Épiphanie Muyenzi as administrative co-ordinator, Jade Kies as communications co-ordinator and Maren Giesbrecht as support associate — and Chelsey Young’s move from admin duties to programming co-ordinator.

Muyenzi, a 32-year-old recent arrival to Winnipeg from Ottawa, is relishing her role in keeping things sorted. “All the information that comes in, I’m the one that does a triage… I’m kind of the gatekeeper of information. It’s trying to manage knowing everything, but also at the same time knowing when something is beyond what I can do,” she says of her role.

Her time at Thin Air has proved to be an eye-opening experience as to how the literary field works. “As a reader, someone who loves walking through a bookstore, I never thought of the work that it takes to get there,” she says. “I know that I’ve only seen a glimpse of what it’s like now, but I’m just amazed. I appreciate the work of a writer so much more — not only are you putting out something that you’re passionate about, you love so much, but you’re also putting it in the hands of your publisher, your publicist, and thinking, ‘Please take care of this and love it as much as I do.’”

Diehl wasn’t part of this year’s publisher pitch meetings, leaving that task to Young, but the conversations they had after the meetings showed Diehl that publishers are being a bit more cautious when it comes to committing authors to writers festivals — no surprise, given the state of the book industry and the arts.

“(Chelsey) came out of those meetings very sobered. She said they’re all signalling that it’s very tight; they’re very nervous,” Diehl says. “In the past, we would have had quite a lot of pitches; this year Chelsey heard them pitch writers but then say, ‘We’re not really sure if we’re going to be able to have them travel.’”

The festival has once again organized readings and events under different themes and in a range of series in venues throughout Winnipeg. The trio of ticketed mainstage events take place at the Rachel Brown Theatre (211 Bannatyne Ave.); Wednesday’s mainstage event, Celebrating Voices in the Circle, takes place Wednesday and includes Brittany Penner, Griffin Bjerke-Clarke, jaye simpson and katherena vermette. Another, dubbed Reliably Unreliable, takes place Friday at 7 p.m. and is hosted by David Bergen; it features Giles Blunt, Kate Cayley, Zilla Jones and Liann Zhang.

“We’re looking at reliable and unreliable narrators, and what happens to the way that you interpret stories. God knows at the moment, we could use a little bit more attention to the reliability of our narrators,” Diehl says.

The free Signature Series events take place at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location and include book launches by Bergen (Monday, 7 p.m.), Bob Joseph (Thursday, 7 p.m.) and the Land & Labour Poetry Collective (Saturday, 7 p.m.).

As the author of 12 novels and two collections of short fiction, Winnipeg author Bergen, who will launch his new novel Days of Feasting and Rejoicing at Thin Air, knows the importance of writer’s festivals all too well. “For a lot of writers it’s really hard to get your book out there. The review pages aren’t very many these days — the Free Press is one of the few left that has dedicated book pages — and so writers festivals are one way of doing that,” he says.

Returning once again is the Niizhotay Stories event, which honours the late author and community leader Theodore Niizhotay Fontaine. This year’s featured author is Bruce McIvor, talking about his book Indigenous Rights in One Minute: What You Need to Know to Talk Reconciliation. The event takes place at McNally Robinson’s Grant Park location on Sunday, Sept. 28, at 1:30 p.m.

The free Big Ideas talks offer afternoon chats by authors about their work, including Hockey Night in Canada/Olympic broadcaster Scott Oake (Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.), who will talk about his memoir For the Love of a Son, as well as Gabrielle Drolet and Ardra Shephard, who will discuss their memoirs Look Ma, No Hands: A Chronic Pain Memoir and Fallosophy: My Trip Through Life with MS, respectively.

“You’re going have two young, really dynamic women who are going to be super candid,” Diehl says of the latter event. “It’s a chance for those of us who don’t live with chronic conditions or disabilities to just shut up and listen for a little bit and kind of get a glimpse of what we don’t notice.” Big Ideas events, along with afternoon book chats and writer studio events throughout the week, all take place at the Bill & Helen Norrie Library at 15 Poseidon Bay.

This year’s festival also features a pair of book fairs — one in English and the other in French. The former, the Made in Manitoba event, takes place today from 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. in the Millennium Library’s Carol Shields Auditorium (251 Donald St.) and includes displays and representatives from 11 local publishers, as well as readings from a trio of local authors.

The French book fair, Salon du livre francophone, happens Saturday, Sept. 27, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Club Éclipse (79-255 Ave. de la Cathédrale) and includes a range of French publishers from across Canada, as well as more than a dozen readers throughout the event.

This festival’s French programming this year has benefited greatly from the addition of co-ordinator Sébastien Gaillard, who enthusiastically drummed up authors and publishers, as well as a formal partnership with La Maison Gabrielle-Roy.

“Seb has a lot of relationships — he’s very hard to resist,” says Diehl, laughing. “I think he has given Épiphanie her first grey hairs — he’s a cloud of ideas all the time, like an atom, things floating around.”

The Nuit Blanche Promenade-slam, which gets going at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, will see both French and English slam poets meander from the Travel Manitoba building at The Forks Market to the Gandhi statue near the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and then over the Provencher Bridge, all the while sharing their slam poetry via a portable sound system. “It’s going to be huge fun,” Diehl says.

As for her role in next year’s festival, Diehl isn’t ready to look that far into the future. “I’m getting my brigade through this round,” she says. “And I hope they’ll all want to come back.”

For a complete list of participating authors and events and for tickets, see thinairwinnipeg.ca.

books@freepress.mb.ca

@bensigurdson